The UK Curry Heat Map

Can your neighbours hack the heat?

Monday, 30 November 2015

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I collected five years of tweets containing names of curries using social media monitoring tool Brandwatch and assigned a heat rating to each location based on the dishes mentioned. I collated the information to produce this UK curry heatmap with a heat rating for every region of the UK:

It reveals some interesting trends. For example Northern cities typically prefer hotter curries than the surrounding areas, whereas in the South the opposite trend can be observed. The difference between Torquay and Devon is particularly stark.

Here’s a rundown of the places who enjoy the hottest curries:

Three northern areas take the top spots, which probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise. What’s interesting to see though is that Birmingham is kept out of the top five by Essex and Kent, while plenty of other southern regions appear in the Top 20. In fact, when the regions are made broader there is a different trend.

Now the southern regions are pushing forward, with Greater London coming in second. Meanwhile, the North East is last out of all the English regions, with the mild Irish, Scots, and Welsh bringing up the rear. Is it possible that idea of the northerner’s loving fiery hot curries rests solely on the reputation of a few localities?

Apparently so. When the localities are grouped it’s actually southerners overall who prefer a hotter curry. If you’d like to take a look at the data you can see it all here. If you’d like to use it yourself, feel free. Just be sure to reference this page and let me know!

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Comments

Comments (2)

Beth Granter

Hey! On a mobile so can't check the data myself, but wondered if you used proportion of hot vs mild curry mentions in each region to define preference, or simply volume of tweets about hot curries in each region? If the latter, did you normalise for population variation in the regions?

Gareth

One strange thing that jumps out is that both Bradford and Birmingham are paler colour than their surroundings. Odd as both are fighting for curry capital of England. 2 answers pop up, 1st curry is no big deal and is eaten regularly or 2nd flavour is more important than heat?